Sunday, June 26, 2016

What is the meaning of Brexit? This from Theodore Dalrymple, a British
writer, critic, and retired physician:

For a long time, Britons who wanted
their country to leave the European Union were regarded almost as mentally ill
by those who wanted it to stay. The
leavers didn’t have an opinion; they had a pathology. Since one doesn’t argue
with pathology, it wasn’t necessary for the remainers to answer the leavers
with more than sneers and derision.

Even after the vote, the attitude
persists. Those who voted to leave are
described as, ipso facto, small-minded, xenophobic, and fearful of the
future. Those who voted to stay are
described as, ipso facto, open-minded, cosmopolitan, and forward-looking.

This from Megan McCardle, an American commentator and
currently a Bloomberg columnist, said to be of a libertarian (small “L”) bent (although
she supported Obama at least once, so consistency may not be her strong suit):

The inability of those elites to
grapple with the rich world’s populist moment was in full display on social
media last night. Journalists and academics seemed to feel that they had not
made it sufficiently clear that people who oppose open borders are a bunch of
racist rubes who couldn’t count to 20 with their shoes on, and hence will
believe any daft thing they’re told. Given how badly this strategy had just
failed, this seemed a strange time to be doubling down…. [P]erhaps they were just unable to grasp … that
nationalism and place still matter, and that elites forget this at their peril.
A lot people do not view their country the way some elites do: as though the
nation were something like a rental apartment -- a nice place to live, but if
there are problems, or you just fancy a change, you’ll happily swap it for a
new one.

In many ways, members of the global
professional class have started to identify more with each other than they have
with the fellow residents of their own countries. Witness the emotional
meltdown many American journalists have been having over Brexit. [….] …[T]he
dominant tone framed [by journalists about Brexit was] as a blow against the
enlightened “us” and the beautiful world we are building, struck by a plague of
morlocks who had crawled out of their hellish subterranean world to attack our
impending utopia.

Whether Brexit will in fact lead to economic damage for
Britain (or for anyone else) in the intermediate to long term is of course
entirely speculative, and it seems that one could make a high-level argument
that it could be of lasting benefit. Brexit
offers to me a sliver of hope for a reversal, through a spreading true-reformist
counter-revolution, of the heretofore seemingly inexorable economic and cultural
decline of Europe specifically and the West generally. In the West, the cultural gulf between the
elites and the hoi polloi they seek to control seems greater now than it has
been in generations, if not centuries. And of course as well, the cosmopolitan,
sophisticated, bien-pensant transnational-minded
elites will try to reverse the effects of this vote – after all, the morlocks
cannot have their way.